At Modder village I hired a horse and rode across the plain to
Magersfontein. I must often have described the place to you--the great
flat and the beak of hill, like a battleship's ram, thrust southward
into it. Do you know, I felt quite awestruck as I approached it. It
seemed quite impossible that I, alone on my pony, could be going to ride
up to and take single-handed that redoubtable hill, which had flung back
the Highlanders, and remained impregnable to all our shelling. I thought
some Boer, or ghost of a Boer, would pop up with his Mauser to defend
the familiar position once more. However, none did. I picked my way
through the trench, littered with scraps of clothing and sacks and
blankets, with tins and cooking things, and broken bottles and all sorts
of rags and debris littered about. The descriptions of the place sent
home after the battle are necessarily very inaccurate. Those I have seen
all introduce several lines of trenches and an elaborate system of
barbed wire entanglements. There is only one trench, however, and no
barbed wire, except one fence along a road. There are, however, a great
number of plain wire strands, about ten yards long perhaps, made fast
between bushes and trees, and left dangling, say, a foot from the
ground. They were not laid in line, but dotted about in every direction,
and, in anything like a dim light, would infallibly trip an advancing
enemy up in all directions.
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